Description:In recognition of John-O's upcoming Nautical Crawl and the recent posts on The Reef restaurant, I thought I would start a thread for the Pieces of Eight restaurant located in Marina Del Rey.

One of the eight (at least) restaurants operated by the Specialty Restaurant company in the LA area that had various degrees of Poly Pop and Nautical themes.

The best image of this restaurant was the rendering posted by Bigbro from the Paul Page album of the same name.

I picked up a souvenir menu postcard showing the fighting ships.

Location map in the MDR harbor.

Menu inside

Lunch

Drinks & Pupus

Matchbook

I posted this menu under the Ports o Call Restaurant, but I think it came from here.

The building is still there and is now Shanghai Red's. Still got some of the old bones.

The exterior rendering you show above is actually a postcard. Jeff Berry also borrowed it to illustrate the Pieces of Eight cocktail recipe. It's a cheap card on thin, non-glossy, yellow copier stock. Here's the caption, no date:

This place went one step beyond nautical decor and clearly tied in the concept of treasure...

...which means pirates, with Polynesian pop. Here's an interesting little piece on the history of the coin:

"It was the coin upon which the US dollar was based, and it remained legal tender in the United States until the Coinage Act of 1857 discontinued the practice. Because it was widely used in Europe, the Americas, and the Far East, it became the first world currency by the late 18th century. Many existing currencies, such as the Canadian dollar, United States dollar, and the Chinese yuan, as well as currencies in Latin America and the Philippine peso, were initially based on the Spanish dollar and other 8-reales coins."

And a good image that explains the name, as the currency was measured by weight of its precious metal, and thus could be cut up into eight pieces:

Just before I got to the bottom photos of DCs post, I was thinking "I wonder if this is that Shanghai something restaurant location?".....lol, I ride my bike by there every so often when I do my 40 mile round trip bike ride...It is a nice looking spot. Very lush, and the water fountains/pool sounds nice as I ride along the bike path..Great stuff guys!

Here's an artist's rendering of the Pieces of Eight from "American Yachtsman" magazine, February 1963. There was a large article on the booming construction in Marina Del Rey and evidently this restaurant was the first in the community. I got a chuckle over how the magazine editors got the theme of the restaurant wrong, but based on its name alone, it's an understandable mistake. I've also included a close-up of the artist's signature just in the hopes that someone might recognize it.

there was probably better detail on the original painting. The picture in the magazine was very small.

Great to see all of this -- mahalo!
I've been there countless times over the years. My family had one of the very first boats there when Marina del Rey was built in 1963 (I was 12) and I've been in PO8 all while it was open and also after it changed to Shanghai Red's. I've even played music in there over the years, until I moved to Hawaii in the early 1990s.
Back in the beginning there was just a dirt road leading down to PO8 and no other buildings around it. They used to always have a guy in a pirate costume out on the main street waving people in, with a large bird on his shoulder, of course. Anyone find photos of that?

That sure is a great rendering Sabu found. I managed to track down a photo of the interior of the Pieces of Eight restaurant. Looks nice, but what's up with the ferns? They were actually used frequently in the Specialty Restaurants.

I am currently looking at another of those daisy-style drink menus, only the one in front of me lists only "Castaways - Pieces of Eight - Ports o' Call". I was recently hired as the menu archivist for the Los Angeles Public Library and any help you experts can provide me on when this menu would be from would be a great help!

I apologize for the quality of my camera pics - we'll be doing real scans sometime in the coming year.